Comments on: More Solaris Broadcom Driver Information

By: Martin Matuska

Martin Matuska — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 01:28:26 +0000

Broadcom has released the Solaris 10 driver version 6.0.3 on their website (Nov 5th, 2010).

By: evg

evg — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 16:55:33 +0000

Hi,

I can confirm that upgrading our Dell R710 servers to the latest BIOS 2.1.15 and latest Broadcom firmware (5.0.13) solves this issue. We are using latest Broadcom 6.0.3 driver.

cheers,
evg

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:13:02 +0000

Hi Fred,

Interesting - thanks for the info! :)

That’s a bit of a shame that they won’t be providing it for S10u8, but not too much of a surprise.

I have reason to believe Broadcom might be making it available later this year on their driver download page. So hopefully it’ll fix the issue.

Cheers,

Alasdair

By: fred

fred — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:55:04 +0000

Sun have supplied a S10U8 bnx 6.0.1 driver under an IDR patch 144627-02 - i have it on 1 system so far (which hasn’t failed but also neither have the other ones with the old driver)

It’s hard to get specifics but they aren’t 100% certain that this is the fix.

I’m told it will never be available publicly under S10u8 and that it’s targeted for S10u10 (and no timeframe on s10u10)

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:30:04 +0000

Hi James,

We disabled C-States over two weeks ago on a collection of servers that were exhibiting the issue. It hasn’t happened since. So we’re satisfied this fixes the issue.

By: James

James — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:55:16 +0000

Hi Alasdair,

So how long ago did you change the C-state on your boxes and are they still up with no re-occurrence of the issue ?

We have the same issue with the Dell 710s and sometimes the issues takes weeks to occur and others twice a day.

Just curious on the length of time.

Thanks.

By: Jack Howard

Jack Howard — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:26:18 +0000

FYI Guys –

Some decent thoughts about this here;

http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspathreadID=5440714&start=0&tstart=0

As I mention in the post there, we’ve been running the same hardware with U7 wit no problems for 9 months. As soon as I patched to U8+ patch cluster we got the failures. Strongly suspect it is in fact related to C-states. It only affects my servers [HP DL360 G6's] that have the newer Xeon E5440’s that support C6 mode.

By: nada

nada — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:51:57 +0000

The link to the IBM Driver ISO Image above is broken. Here is a working one (tested today):

http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?brandind=5000008&lndocid=MIGR-5081963

By: Teddie

Teddie — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:01:35 +0000

We have also been running network load test on an R410 with the C-states disabled and haven’t had reoccurrence yet. This has been done now for around 40 hours.. some 12h more and it will go to production.

Interesting part with the problem was that it only occurred under network or some other load. So when production load was taken off from the server, the network card did work for an extended period.

By: Alasdair

Alasdair — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:51:58 +0000

Oh and thanks for commenting to let others know - much appreciated! :)